Engineers made battery electrodes out of pollen

"I was fascinated by the beauty and diversity of pollen microstructures. But the idea of using them as battery anodes did not really kick in until I started working on battery research and learned more about carbonization of biomass," says Jialiang Tang. (Credit: Lennart Tange/Flickr)

Pollen from bees and cattails could potentially be a renewable material for making anodes in lithium-ion batteries, recent tests show.

Batteries have two electrodes, called an anode and a cathode. The anodes in most of today’s lithium-ion batteries are made of graphite. Lithium ions are contained in a liquid called an electrolyte, and these ions are stored in the anode during recharging.

“Both are abundantly available,” says Vilas Pol, an associate professor in the School of Chemical Engineering and the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue University. “The bottom line here is we want to learn something from nature that could be useful in creating better batteries with renewable feedstock.”

Whereas bee pollen is a mixture of different pollen types collected by honeybees, the cattail pollens all have the same shape.

“I started looking into pollens when my mom told me she had developed pollen allergy symptoms about two years ago,” says doctoral student Jialiang Tang. “I was fascinated by the beauty and diversity of pollen microstructures. But the idea of using them as battery anodes did not really kick in until I started working on battery research and learned more about carbonization of biomass.”

This scanning electron microscope image shows bee pollen studied for potential use as electrodes for lithium-ion batteries. Color was added to the original black-and-white image. (Credit: Purdue University/Jialiang Tang)

The researchers processed the pollen under high temperatures in a chamber containing argon gas using a procedure called pyrolysis, yielding pure carbon in the original shape of the pollen particles. They were further processed, or “activated,” by heating at lower temperature—about 300 degrees Celsius—in the presence of oxygen, forming pores in the carbon structures to increase their energy-storage capacity.

The research showed the pollen anodes could be charged at various rates. While charging for 10 hours resulted in a full charge, charging them for only one hour resulted in more than half of a full charge, Pol says.